Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of October 4, 2021
The Lead
On the Internet, We’re Always Famous
On the internet, which was a mistake:
Imagine, for a moment, you find yourself equipped with fennec-fox-level hearing at a work function or a cocktail party. It’s hard to focus amid the cacophony, but with some effort you can eavesdrop on each and every conversation. At first you are thrilled, because it is thrilling to peer into the private world of another person. Anyone who has ever snuck a peek at a diary or spent a day in the archives sifting through personal papers knows that. Humans, as a rule, crave getting up in people’s business.
But something starts to happen. First, you hear something slightly titillating, a bit of gossip you didn’t know. A couple has separated, someone says. “They’ve been keeping it secret. But now Angie’s dating Charles’s ex!” Then you hear something wildly wrong. “The F.D.A. hasn’t approved it, but also there’s a whole thing with fertility. I read about a woman who had a miscarriage the day after the shot.” And then something offensive, and you feel a desire to speak up and offer a correction or objection before remembering that they have no idea you’re listening. They’re not talking to you.
Then, inevitably, you hear someone say something about you. Someone thinks it’s weird that you’re always five minutes late for the staff meeting, or wonders if you’re working on that new project that Brian started doing on the side, or what the deal is with that half-dollar-sized spot of gray hair on the back of your head. Injury? Some kind of condition?
Suddenly—and I speak from a certain kind of experience on this, so stay with me—the thrill curdles. If you overhear something nice about you, you feel a brief warm glow, but anything else will ball your stomach into knots. The knowledge is taboo; the power to hear, permanently cursed.
It would be better at this point to get rid of the fennec ears. Normal human socializing is impossible with them. But even if you leave the room, you can’t unhear what you’ve heard.
This is what the Internet has become. [New Yorker]
Good journalism/Cool shit
Dangerous Air: As California burns, America breathes toxic smoke
Really great data viz and journalism on California wildfires. [KCRW]
It also seems utterly unlikely to achieve the goals that the progressives want. Manchin and Sinema would like to pass the infrastructure bill, but they don’t care about it so much that they’d do anything to save it. Nor would they be likely to take the brunt of public anger if the bill got killed — after all, they voted for it. Americans are not going to accept a complex progressive narrative about how Manchin and Sinema are actually the ones who killed the bill because they didn’t accede to this and that demand from the progressives. Instead, the people who failed to vote for the infrastructure bill will be the ones who are perceived to have killed the infrastructure bill.
And that would be a shame. The progressives are treating the infrastructure bill like it’s unimportant — a pawn to sacrifice, or even a Trojan horse designed to make the reconciliation bill seem less necessary. But in fact, the infrastructure bill is a good and important bill in its own right; even if the reconciliation bill passes in all its full $3.5 trillion glory, the infrastructure bill needs to happen as well…
Instead, the way to proceed is to give Biden as many wins (or as the kids would say, as many W’s) as fast as possible. The bipartisan infrastructure bill has already passed the Senate — which, due to the filibuster, is America’s main legislative veto point. So pass it instantly. Then don’t pause — go on to the next fight. As soon as the infrastructure bill passes, forget about it and memory-hole it (until it’s time to trumpet its success in midterm races). Shift attention and energy entirely to the reconciliation bill — and then to filibuster reform, the voting rights bill, and so on.
This will instantly put Manchin, Sinema, and the moderates on the defensive. If they don’t support the reconciliation bill, it will be them holding up Biden’s agenda, them making the Dems look dysfunctional, them keeping money out of the hands of working parents. They will then be the bad guys, the wrench in the gears of America. The pressure and attention will entirely be on them.
The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting
And good stuff from Ezra (my pet issue of housing once again):
But progressives are often uninterested in the creation of the goods and services they want everyone to have. This creates a problem and misses an opportunity. The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. You can see the poisoned fruit of those mistakes in higher education and housing. But it also misses the opportunity to pull the technologies of the future progressives want into the present they inhabit. That requires a movement that takes innovation as seriously as it takes affordability…
There are sharp limits on supply in all of these sectors because regulators make it hard to increase supply (zoning laws make it difficult to build housing), training and hiring workers is expensive (adding classrooms means adding teachers and teacher aides, and expanding health insurance requires more doctors and nurses) or both. “This can result in a vicious cycle in which subsidies for supply-constrained goods or services merely push up prices, necessitating greater subsidies, which then push up prices, ad infinitum,” they write. [New York Times]
Health, politics, and academia
More Than Half of Police Killings Are Mislabeled, New Study Says
Some good research:
Researchers estimated that over the time period they studied, which roughly tracks the era of the war on drugs and the rise of mass incarceration, nearly 31,000 Americans were killed by the police, with more than 17,000 of them going unaccounted for in the official statistics. The study also documented a stark racial gap: Black Americans were 3.5 times as likely to be killed by the police as white Americans were. Data on Asian Americans was not included in the study, but Latinos and Native Americans also suffered higher rates of fatal police violence than white people.
The annual number of deaths in police custody has generally gone upward since 1980, even as crime — notwithstanding a rise in homicides last year amid the dislocations of the coronavirus pandemic — has declined from its peak in the early 1990s. [New York Times]
Hate reading
The Conservatives Dreading—And Preparing for—Civil War
Ok this article is hilarious and insane that these are supposedly the “serious ones” on the right.
One of the institutional vehicles for it was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was meant to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence for Black Americans coming out of segregation. But the courts and administrative agencies quickly turned against the color-blind, equal-opportunity vision of the founding and toward affirmative action—this calculation of current oppressor or past oppressor, and the pursuit of equity and social justice.
Ah yes, the color-blind, equal-opportunity vision of the founding fathers who *checks notes* only gave those rights to white male land owners?
Now this seems to mean that we’re really not going to be where we need to be until all groups are equally represented and have the same outcomes for, say, home ownership, wealth, the proportion of CEOs, or members of Congress. That seems to be the goal of wokeism.
How dare I defend… equality?
You don’t have to read far between the lines to see his entire case is build upon “actually white people are better than blacks and those damned Asians make building my case both easier and more complicated.” It’s an insane take! And it’s so blatant! On one hand, I kinda respect it. On the other, yikes. [The Atlantic]